1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of fast mode decision of an enhancement layer using rate-distortion cost (RD cost) in an SVC encoder and an apparatus thereof, and in particular, to a method of fast mode decision of an enhancement layer using rate-distortion cost in an Scalable Video Coding (SVC) encoder capable of fast determining motion prediction in an enhancement layer without deteriorating image quality using a bitrate-distortion cost of a lower layer and a bitrate-distortion cost of a previous frame to perform fast video encoding and an apparatus thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, due to uncompressed digital data having a very large size, frame signals to be transmitted and stored need to be compressed. In other words, in order to minimize a bandwidth required to transmit digitally encoded video data, a video compression algorithm is applied to the digitally encoded video data.
A video compression technology according to the related art compresses a large capacity of video data under the assumption it is within a predetermined network bandwidth due to a limited operation environment of hardware, which does not consider a flexible network environment.
Therefore, in order to compress the video data to be used under the network environment where the bandwidth frequently varies, a new compression technology is needed. A scalable video codec algorithm was developed in order to solve the above problem.
However, the scalable video codec, which is an extended codec based on the currently and widely used H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), provides three scalabilities associated with spatial, temporal, and image quality aspects, the complexity is significantly increased accordingly. Therefore, the complexity should be lowered in order to be applicable for various platform terminals or service applications.
As a result, the scalable video codec providing three scalabilities based on the complex algorithm of H.264 essentially performs a significantly complex operation as compared to H.264. The complex video codec cannot perform fast encoding at the user desired rate upon processing general video signals. Therefore, a method for effectively and fast encoding an algorithm without deteriorating image quality should be researched.